Category: Customer service

It’s no secret that our lives become more dependent on and interdependent with digital technology nearly every day. Consumer device integration with AI and wireless communications abounds: Alexa controls our kitchen appliances; we video chat with our colleagues, friends, and family; we receive instant notifications on our phones when money is transferred, an order is delivered, or someone is at the door. We rely on our smartphones not only to communicate with others but as our most important source of information. The phrases “Google it,” “Skype me,” and “YouTube it” are common action verbs used in quotidian interactions. We are all accustomed to having reliable Internet connections at home, at work, and on the go, but being “connected” is not always a given outside the US, and certainly not at sea.

To demonstrate the importance of choosing the right communications provider for global service, we invite you to sail around the world with us and see how satellite communications allow Lepton to be your single global service provider.

We start our voyage from the west coast of the United States heading toward Hawaii, and then on to the Philippines. As we traverse satellite beam footprints crossing the ocean, Lepton utilizes its global Network Management System (NMS) to switch our network from Intelsat’s Horizons 1 America beam to Eutelsat’s 172B North Pacific Beam, and then to the South West Pacific beam as we near the Philippines.

Lepton Global is the only small business satellite communications provider that offers a global Ku-band satellite network.

How did we choose these satellites? Ku-band beams make the most sense for a multi-application global satellite network for several reasons: the equipment can be small, it performs well in inclement weather, and the footprints are wide enough that we can build a global network with a reasonable number of overlapping beams. We concentrate on the redundancy of Ku-band beams as well as the ground equipment at our customer sites and our teleport hubs.

Using one provider eliminates the need to deal with multiple compatibilities.

iDirect-based satellite communications providers operate their networks on various firmware versions. Purchasing services for each region from different providers is possible, but firmware compatibility is not guaranteed. If your modem is configured to run one version of the firmware, switching to another provider does not ensure that your modem will be compatible. This issue is eliminated when working withLepton Global as we operate a truly global network.

Working with one provider gives you peace of mind.

Who is responding to your technical support issues? Multiple communications providers call for various points of contact. While working with Lepton, you stay in touch with your dedicated Program Manager and our global Network Operations Center (NOC) located in Vienna, Virginia. Everyone on our technical support team is connected to a centralized system for ongoing technical issues and is familiar with each customer’s platform. Our NOC operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, proactively monitoring customer remotes and solving issues before they start to affect your service. Each customer receives MyPortal access with their service order for access to real-time network statistics: data usage, upstream and downstream speeds, weather patterns, antenna signal strength, and other helpful data.

U.S. IP addressing makes your journey far from home feel like home.

Let’s continue on our journey from the Philippines along the coast of Singapore to Sri Lanka and the southern portion of India to find out how. These countries have rich histories, diverse landscapes, and most important to your browsing experience, different languages. When you visit any of these countries, navigating the Internet might become a challenge. Most likely, when you type “Google” in your web browser, you will get routed to the local Google servers ending in .sg or .in. The hope is that your device will recognize that English is your native language and translate the page; however, you might get your answers in Sinhalese or Tamil. As you travel from Sri Lanka to northern Africa, you might run into another issue; the Internet is heavily censored in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, and your Internet browsing capabilities may become limited. Single IP addressing will quickly fix these problems. A customer connecting to the Internet using Lepton’s global network is assigned a designated IP address that reroutes all Internet traffic and requests through the United States. Our users experience the same Internet they would on their home computers.

Cybersecurity protection is key to safeguarding our customers.

One of the greatest concerns while using the Internet during international travel is that of cybersecurity. Will you be able to check your bank statements and pay your bills online safely? Can you make online purchases without compromising your identity online? Satellite communications solutions provided by Lepton Global have built-in encryption at the remote for both upload and download links. Your data transfer is secured from cyber-attacks by our network firewalls, and network intrusion detection and protection services are included. These security features are baked into our networks – we offer a safe and secure solution to every customer, regardless of their mission and at no extra cost.

With Lepton Global Boost™ your Internet activity is cached to increase the speed and functionality of your service.

While exploring what to do on land along your expedition, there is no time to wait around for the local site-seeing websites to load. Incorporating Lepton Global Boost™ into your satellite communications solution makes browsing your favorite websites faster. Your search history is cached on-site, saving portions of your favorite pages for easy access, and limiting the satellite download requirement for new information only.

Traveling from the Indian Ocean through the Mediterranean Sea and back to the eastern shore of the United States should be a breeze (since you are protected against cybercriminals, let’s hope you don’t run into real pirates along the way). Your signal will switch seamlessly from Eutelsat’s E70B Wide beam to Intelsat’s 34 North Atlantic beam as you exit the Mediterranean and hit the Atlantic Ocean. Once you arrive safely back on the East Coast, you will switch back to our original Intelsat’s Horizons 1 America beam, and no doubt have many photos to upload from your journey!

Lepton Global is solving connectivity with customers in mind. Our priority is customizing solutions that eliminate the complexities of satellite communications in our user experience. We provide our customers with a fast, secure, and seamless Internet experience. How we achieve this goal makes Lepton Global a leader among small business satellite communications providers.

Lepton Global Solutions is proud to have reached a significant milestone in our organizational development and commitment to quality: ISO 9001:2015 certification. As explained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), “The ISO 9001:2015 standard is based on a number of quality management principles including a strong customer focus, the motivation and implication of top management, the process approach, and continual improvement.”

What ISO 9001:2015 means to our company:

At Lepton, quality management primarily means continuously striving to deliver a better experience for our customers. We ensure that our organization is operating as a well-functioning system, not just individual people working toward a common goal. We are committed to improving every aspect of our business – from customer service to processes to business metrics. Through our adherence to ISO quality standards, we regularly review and revise our practices for improvement.

What the Certification means to our employees:

ISO 9001:2015 implementation is an asset for Lepton employees. Thanks to our QMS, Lepton employees understand the expectations of their jobs through clearly defined roles and performance metrics. Each member of our team is responsible for shaping their own goals, and they receive valuable and timely feedback through periodic review sessions. Our quality system also empowers employees by making them directly responsible for tracking and improving processes that affect their work; employees are expected to modify and adjust goals according to the growth patterns of our business.

What ISO accreditation means to our customers:

Adherence to the Quality Management Standard means we are always trying to be better. We are constantly collecting data on our performance, eliminating mistakes, and adjusting our processes to provide the best possible customer service. Our company culture is centered around delivering critical services and products with flexibility and agility. While it may seem paradoxical, we are able to do this with accuracy and professionalism at a high op-tempo because of our adherence to processes. ISO 9001:2015 is a flexible standard, and we have designed a quality management system that meets the standard while still addressing the needs of our customers and other stakeholders.

What ISO Quality Management System means to our partners:

ISO QMS certification provides a benchmark to vendors and customers about our commitment to quality. It also opens doors to partnering with more companies that value and even require the same high standards and dedication to quality customer service. Vendors know we will be good stewards of their products. Customers can be confident that what they have asked of us is what they will receive.

Around the Clock Service

In today’s global economy, you can buy a printer, request food delivery, or have a credit card issued at literally any time, day or night. And you will often find a customer service representative available to help regardless of the hour. For any company to operate successfully on a global scale, the around-the-clock technical support team is a necessity. The same is, of course, true for satellite communications companies like Lepton, which is why we operate our Network Operation Center (NOC) 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

Going Beyond 24×7

What does the NOC mean to us at Lepton? Perhaps second to our website, the NOC is among our most visible customer-facing assets. We hold our technicians to high standards of professionalism, technical capability, and concern for the quality of our services. Having personnel to cover a 24×7 NOC requirement is de rigueur, but we also require that each member of our team be attentive, personable, and knowledgeable about the breadth of antenna systems that our customers operate. We also encourage our staff to grow and improve; we invest in our team by providing training and certification courses to ensure competency and familiarity with various types of satellite equipment and networking platforms. Because we take an agnostic approach when selecting equipment for customer solutions – focused on their needs rather than our manufacturer alliances – our technicians must be well-prepared to service a variety of VSAT manufacturer models and form factors.

Our NOC staff truly work as a team, and each member is invested in supporting their teammates and our customers to ensure operations are successful. Being a NOC technician is not shift work at Lepton, it is a lifestyle. Our customers are looking for someone on the other end of the line who cares, listens, and really wants to solve their issues. Our technicians use a personable approach with customers; they become trusted guides in all things satellite, even beyond our service. It is not uncommon for customers to call Lepton technicians on their cell phones with questions unrelated to the service Lepton provides because they know they will receive a helpful and urgent response.

Leading with Action

At Lepton, we believe in preventing, not reacting to problems. Our strategy involves proactive network monitoring tools that keep the Lepton NOC team one step ahead of potential issues, such as weather, modem temperature, or something as simple as an Ethernet cable being unplugged. This proactive approach, as compared to the conventional reactive nature of most technical support centers not only saves Lepton and our customers money, but it reduces downtime, conserves hardware, and fosters a relationship of trust between the NOC staff and the end-user in the field. When our customers call with an issue, we are already working to resolve it.

Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) software is tightly integrated into our suite of NOC tools. Lepton has partnered with industry leading software including iDirect iMonitor® and SolarWinds® to ensure continuous oversight of our satellite network nodes. We have also outfitted our NOC engineers with the latest in radio frequency (RF) monitoring equipment, and our networking infrastructure has fully redundant power and Internet access. The robustness of our NOC ensures our NOC team will be in touch with our customers regardless of conditions.

For a service-oriented small business, it is essential to take a 21st-century approach to customer service. Lepton does so by providing high-quality, 24x7x365 customer support, by investing in our people, and by employing the latest technologies to offer proactive support.